“They haven’t found this… my hideaway… my secret place… they don’t know about it… the impulses can’t come here…”
She pushed the front door open. There was no lock. Murmuring crazily, holding on to my arm, she drew me up the stairway. The second floor was destroyed, abandoned, the same as the building I’d hidden in before. But on the third floor there were walls and doors. Some of the doors were shut, and light came out from underneath them. I heard some low music coming from behind one of the others.
We climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Then she drew me down the hallway to her door. It was locked with a padlock. The woman-Jane-finally let go of my arm in order to fish the key out of her huge overcoat.
“It’s the door, that’s why,” she murmured. “It’s special. The electricity can’t get through. It’s blocked.”
She unlocked the padlock and pushed inside. I followed her.
The air in the apartment was dense and gnarly. It smelled bad, like a litter box that hadn’t been emptied in a long time. Sure enough, as soon as I stepped over the threshold, I heard cats mewing. Jane pressed a switch. A dim yellow light came on in the ceiling. And there they were: three cats-one black, one orange, one gray. The gray one took an exploratory pass through my legs, then all three of them clustered around Jane’s feet. Jane went on murmuring, but she was murmuring to the cats now, her tone more tender than before. She rigged an iron bar across the door as a makeshift lock. She was talking to the cats the whole time. “There they are, safe and sound, my darlings… the impulses can’t touch them here… none of that nasty mind control for my beautiful darlings… Jane will protect you…”
The cats, meanwhile, wove in and out between her feet, tumbling over one another and meowing. She had to step carefully not to fall over them as she moved away from the door. The cats continued to follow her as she stooped down and turned on a small electric space heater sitting in one corner. Then she moved on into the kitchenette, murmuring to the cats as the cats mewed back at her.
I looked around. The apartment was one room, and it was an unholy mess. The walls were all cracked and chipped. Some of them even had holes broken through the plaster so you could see the beams and wires underneath. There were great big black plastic bags everywhere-in the corners, against the wall, up on a counter in the kitchenette. The bags were stuffed full of what looked like junk as far as I could see: old clothes and broken appliances and cans and bottles and stuff like that.
There was an old dirty mattress lying on the floor and a lamp standing next to it with no lampshade. There was a chair, too, a dirty old canvas chair, set low to the ground like a beach chair.
And then there were the newspapers. They were all over the place. They were everywhere. They were taped to the wall like wallpaper. They covered the floor like a carpet. They were stacked between the plastic bags. They lay littering the bed and the chair. Newspapers on top of newspapers. The place was practically stuffed with them.
I looked over to the kitchenette. There was a microwave oven on the counter in there, and some stacks of food cans and some spotty bowls and glasses. There were no kitchen cabinets, but you could see the marks on the wall where they’d been torn down. There were more newspapers there too-on the wall, on the counter, and on the floor.
Jane stood in the kitchenette with the cats twining around her ankles. She was cranking a can opener around a can of cat food.
“Have to eat to keep your strength… for the big fight when they come… they sent a knife-man after Jane tonight, my babies… but then he came… mm-hmm… because he knows… because they’re after him, too, just like Jane…”
The cats fell over one another as she spooned some cat food out into a bowl for them and set it on the floor. They took their places around the bowl and ate hungrily.
“Just like Jane… mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You hungry?”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. “Oh,” I said. “No. Thank you, ma’am. I’m fine. I ate a little while ago.” Even before I finished, she had gone off muttering again, chattering softly in that same dreamy, eerie tone.
She had gone to work opening another can now, a can of soup. She poured it into a bowl and set the bowl in the microwave, chattering softly all the while it cooked. Finally, she brought it out and carried the bowl over to the mattress. Newspapers on the mattress crumpled as she sat down on them. She huddled there, blowing on the soup, still talking softly.
“If they think so, they don’t know Jane… not me, not Jane… electric rays, impulses, connections… that’s what they know, that’s what they think… but not Jane… Take a seat, Charlie… I’m not afraid of them… I’m not going to let them in… we know, don’t we?”
I stood staring at her. She had called me by my name. Take a seat, Charlie. Out in the street, when she said, “I know you,” she was telling the truth. She had recognized me. She knew who I was.
“Go on, go on,” she said. “Take a seat.”
I hesitated another moment, unsure what to do. Should I run away? Would she turn me in? Then I just said, “Thank you, ma’am.” And I moved to the canvas chair and lowered myself into it. I watched as she lifted the bowl of soup to her lips. She sipped at it noisily, her dreadlocks falling around her face.
“You know my name,” I said.
She came out of the soup and murmured, “Charlie West. Mm-hmm. Jane knows. It’s in the papers.”
She patted the space around herself on the mattress. She found the page she wanted and handed it to me. I took it. Fugitive Killer Caught, said the headline. There was my picture underneath it, right on the front page. I was staring into the camera with wide, frightened eyes. It was a mug shot. They must’ve taken it when I was arrested for Alex’s murder.
“They got ahold of you, didn’t they?” the lady said. “They got hold of you and put out the word, oh yes. Electricity, that’s how they do it. Impulses. Mind control. Oh, they can make you believe anything. They put it in the papers and everyone goes along. Jane knows how it works.”
I actually smiled a little at that. It felt like I hadn’t smiled in a long time, not really. But it was funny: it was obvious that Jane was crazy, but at the same time, what she was saying made a certain amount of sense too.
“You’re not afraid of me, then?” I asked her. “You don’t think I’m a killer, like the paper says.”
“Oh.” She gave a laugh and blew on her soup, leaning into it for warmth. “Oh no, Jane knows you’re not a killer. Jane knows. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If you were a killer, you wouldn’t have saved Jane from the knife-man, would you? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
I scratched my head at that, wondering. Because again, she was right, wasn’t she? It didn’t make sense. Maybe I was just as crazy as she was, but, strange as it may sound, the thought kind of touched me. Here I’d been worrying about whether maybe I really was a bad guy-maybe I was a killer like Detective Rose said. But Jane-Crazy Jane-had come up with the answer. If I was a bad guy, I wouldn’t have helped her. If I was a killer, I wouldn’t be the person I was. I was grateful to Jane for understanding that and for explaining it to me. I was grateful to her for believing in me-even if she was crazy.
Unfortunately, the next thing I knew she was babbling pure nonsense again. “They try to put those things in my head, you know, make me believe them. With electricity. Impulses. But not Jane. They can’t get Jane. That’s why they sent the knife-man. Because I won’t believe the voices. The impulses don’t work on me. I know what they’re up to. I know.” She lifted the bowl and slurped some more soup from it.
I was confused now. If some of what she said was true, how did I know the rest wasn’t? “Uh… who sent the knife-man?” I asked her. “Who sends the impulses?”
She looked this way and that, as if she was afraid someone was listening in. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, “The people from the hospital. They’re the ones. It’s mind control, that’s what it is. They say, no, no, no, no, no, no, but…” She shook her finger in the air and laughed at that idea. “Jane knows.”